It didn’t take long into my career as a fitness professional to realise that whatever the “thing” was that people would come to me for, it was very rarely JUST the “thing”. Clients would come to me with a stated aim, or a goal, and we’d start working towards that. What quite often happened though, was that my clients would drop a casual comment about how they felt about their bodies, or what they thought might be stopping them from achieving their life goals, or their relationship with food … and I realised that if I wanted to help clients, not only with the “thing”, but also the “stuff that feeds into the thing”, that effects the “thing”, and may be stopping a client from achieving the “thing”, then I’d better educate myself properly and get some more qualifications.
To that end, not only am I now a qualified Life Coach, but I’ve also qualified in a number of counselling techniques (Person-Centred Counselling and Cognative Behavioural Therapy) so that I can better assist clients.
Now that I’ve been using these skills for a number of years, it’s not only PT clients who benefit. I also have seperate Life Coaching clients who have a whole range of issues they’d like help with, from career changes, to life decisions and change of circumstances.
What’s important to note is that Life Coaching isn’t telling the client what they should do, (although many clients do wish it were that easy!), but a collaborative process through which clients can identify their end-point and figure out the steps to get there.
